Interview with Joel Coen

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By Smriti Mundhra

I wish that there were some secret to the way Joel and Ethan Coen make movies. I wish that there were some bizarre ritual or habit or some kind of classified information I could take credit for letting IGN FilmForce readers in on. Having worked on two of their films before turning to journalism for my livelihood, I've had the rare experience of seeing how the Brothers operate during the filmmaking process, which, considering the kind and quality of the films they produce, ought to yield at least one eyebrow-raising anecdote. But alas, the quirkiest thing about the Coen Brothers is that they are seemingly quirkless. From my vantage point over the two summers that brought us O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the upcoming noir drama The Man Who Wasn't There, Joel and Ethan Coen perfectly fit the profile of Normal Guys. Maybe a little too normal."Come on, you've seen the way we work," Joel Coen tells me during an interview in Los Angeles. "You know there's nothing mysterious about it." I ask him what he's trying to hide by continually refusing to provide audio commentary on the DVDs of his films. "I don't know," he replies vaguely, further propagating my hypothesis that Something Is Up. "Generally speaking, it's not something I listen to. Usually, I don't want to sit down and listen to the director gas on about his movie. I just can't actually imagine myself sitting down and having that much to say."Could it be that the creative team that has brought to us the bizarre worlds of Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink and Fargo are really just regular Joe's? Joel Coen would like to have us think so. "Maybe there should be less of a mystique around making movies," he asserts. "I just don't think that there's any real mystery there."Fans of Joel and Ethan Coen are perpetually looking to figure out what makes the brothers so creative. There are Joel and Ethan Coen film societies and college classes devoted to the subject of decoding their films. "I think those things should be discouraged," says Joel. "I'm afraid one of the members of those clubs is going to be the person that assassinates Ethan in five years."The latest addition in an incredibly prolific few years for Joel and Ethan Coen is The Man Who Wasn't There, which brings them back to the noir genre of their debut, Blood Simple, which put them on the map as filmmakers. For his favorite film noir, Joel cites The Maltese Falcon, "and I like the Billy Wilder movie Double Indemnity," he adds. "And then I like the sort of skanky film noirs, the real low budget Edgar G. Ulmer kind, you know, Detour kind of movies." In the vein of the classic noir films of half a century ago, The Man Who Wasn't There aims to recall not only the look, but also the feeling of its time. "With this one, we were thinking noir to a certain extent, but we were also thinking about science fiction movies from the early 1950s. You know, the flying saucers and the pod people." According to Joel, the purpose of adding science fiction elements to his noir film was to evoke the mindset of 1950s suburbia. "We were interested in the whole idea of post-war anxiety, you know, atom bombing anxiety and the existential dread you see in '50s movies, which curiously seems appropriate now."Having noir elements isn't the only recurring theme from previous works in The Man Who Wasn't There; the film boasts another of the spectacular array of odd supporting characters that have become the toast  and, to some, the malfunction  of the Coen Brothers' films. Joel and Ethan are as often chastised as they are regaled for their interesting choice of characters. "I've never really understood that," says Joel, of the numerous letters he and Ethan receive protesting their supposed usage of unflattering stereotypes. "It's a funny thing; people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow  that to me is kind of inexplicable." He admits, "I guess there's a certain amount of poking fun at certain characters, but that's because there is something amusing about them or about the way they behave, so I guess you can say that that's poking fun at the character. But the character is your own invention, so who cares?"The boys have come under fire for misrepresenting everyone from Minnesotans to Southerners to Vietnam veterans. "If you have a character that's specific ethnically, or regionally  let's say this character is from Minnesota, or this character is Jewish, or this character is a Unitarian from Omaha  that character is supposed to stand in and represent all Jews, or all Unitarians from Omaha, or all Minnesotans, and of course that's ridiculous," he explains. "You're doing it to make the character as specific as possible, so that it¿s a specific individual that you¿re talking about, not that whole class of people.""We create monsters and then we can't control them," he says, laughing at the theory that he and his brother are like Dr. Frankenstein figures. "No, really, you love all your characters, even the ridiculous ones. You have to on some level; they're your weird creations in some kind of way. I don't even know how you approach the process of conceiving the characters if in a sense you hated them. It's just absurd."

Continue on to the second half of Smriti's interview with Joel Coen  in which Joel discusses the demise of the To the White Sea project, why he gives so few interviews, his fears as a filmmaker, where he sees himself in twenty years, and more.